


Isolation

by Roadsterguy



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Childhood Memories, Friendship, Gen, Isolation, Loneliness, Memories, Quarantine, Virus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:15:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25719433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roadsterguy/pseuds/Roadsterguy
Summary: I was recently turned on to the Mass Effect games by Kahvi, and as I've been in isolation to prevent the spread of SARS-CoV2 since March and expect that to continue for at least a year, I found Tali's character and situation to be a lovely way to help me process my own feelings, to help me do the good work of isolating and mask-wearing that's necessary in the US. This is a short vignette, to that end.
Kudos: 3





	Isolation

When I was younger, I was held. Hands touched my bare skin; I was carried, I was held. This is what I was told, in many ways, by those who were there, when we sat in a little circle to swap tales, real and imagined, to entertain us in the evenings after our long workdays - _I_ certainly don't remember it. It was so long ago. My brain an infant's brain, years away from emerging from the fog into consciousness. By then, I was wearing a child's suit, made of carefully placed barrier fields, until I grew old enough for my adult envirosuit, donning it with great pride. I didn't know what _touch_ was. I still do not.

I got very sick when I was held, they tell me, the details varying by the storyteller, but always the cough, the fever, my tiny body defiantly shaking its fists and squalling until I recovered. That happens, when we touch each other. I knew children who would try it, little rebels who thought themselves clever and brave, shorting bits of their barriers to expose their skin momentarily. They got sick, very sick, and learned never to do that again. The rest of us learned from them.

No, I don't remember touch. So it makes little sense that I would miss it. Did that first ever touch, too long ago for conscious memory, imprint itself on me, somehow? Is it a cruelty that we _hold_ our newborn children, let them feel the warm touch of another being, give them something to _miss_? Or is it a racial memory, engraved deeply into our DNA - that sensation of touch, warm and supportive, the sweet sense of it echoing down the centuries, down the sterile halls of our ships? Is that why I wrap my arms around myself - even this embrace distanced from my own self, skin separated from skin by the envirosuit?

The suit is itself an embrace. It holds me close, tightly, snugly. It covers me, keeps me safe, holds the dangers of the universe just outside at bay - just a few millimeters, but with a strength and distance that might as well be light-years. It is comforting, familiar, close, _real_.

Then why do I still dream, sometimes, of being separated from it? Of running across the surface of our homeworld, one I've only seen in pictures and on video? Why do I dream of wearing nothing but the lightest of cloth, air on my arms, my face? Why do I dream of running to my mother, having her hold me tightly, warmly in my arms? An embrace that makes me feel safe to leave it again, run away again, and run back to it, knowing it to be there when I returned. Not an embrace like the suit that holds me always, always, never parted, never safe unless I am inside.

The suit is what keeps me alive. The dreams, the longing - that's what gives me _hope_. And hope I must have, because what are the odds that I will ever emerge from the suit? I can't calculate them; I've tried, but it is not like the flip of a coin, something that can be determined by physics and confirmed by observation. My fingers fly over the keyboard, but they hesitate when I try to quantify the _denominator_. 

How can you quantify something that has never yet happened?

Hope is what I have. And these friends I now have - these unexpected friends, so unlike me, so complementary, from so unimaginably far away - they are what sustain it.


End file.
